1916 by Mick O'Farrell

Author:Mick O'Farrell
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Mercier Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

‘This larkinite & Sinn Fein rising’

A letter from solicitor Sir John Robert O’Connell to British politician Cecil Harmsworth, written soon after the surrender.1

Telegrams

O’Connell, Ballybrack.

Telephone 20 Killiney.

Ard Einin,

Killiney.

Co. Dublin

7th May 19162

My dear Harmsworth

Just a line to thank you very sincerely indeed for all your kindness & to say that I quite realise that it would have been impossible to have done more even before this truly deplorable rising put all other matters into the background. We seem to have travelled a long way since I wrote you first only a few weeks ago. A great deal of the Dublin which you and I knew in our T.C.D. days has been wiped out. The G.P.O. which after more than 100 years was only completed three months ago is now in ruins, the Hibernian Academy is wiped out and the Curator Kavanagh a painter of some merit went down in the ruins.3 The Freeman’s Journal offices are gone as are also the supplementary printing works of the Irish Times. The loss of life has been very heavy not only amongst the military & the insurgents but amongst the innocent civilian population who imprisoned in their houses were forced to come out to buy food and were then sniped by soldiers or rebels.

The Alma Mater saved the situation on Easter Monday by preventing the rebels from getting the Bank of Ireland and in various other ways the O.T.C. of T.C.D. did wonders; and an entrance exam and a parliamentary election were conducted within the walls of old Trinity while the roar of the machine guns almost rendered the voices inaudible.

I do hope that the English public will have no delusions about this rising and that it will realise that it was as much directed against Home Rule and against Redmond as against England. And further that there is not a responsible man in Ireland – of any class or creed – who does not deplore this Larkinite & Sinn Fein rising more bitterly than any Englishman can do.

Again many thanks

Yours sincerely

John Rt O’Connell

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